On My Boys' General Cuteness...

I often agonize over the fact that I let Stevie watch too much TV. He also gets quite carried away with computer games and playing the Wii. So naturally I felt pretty good as I watched some of the imaginative games my kids have been playing the past few days.

Yesterday, Stevie assembled all his toy drums together. He assigned a (drum set) name to each drum. Then he would say (out loud), “Hi, my name is Stevie and I play the drums. This is my bass drum,”—then plays it—“This is my snare, this is my floor tom, this is my high tom, these are my cymbals. And when you put it all together, it sounds like this:”—then he begins playing uproarious drum solos on his faux-set. He ends by saying “That’s it! My name is Stevie, and my cool trick is playing drums!”

To be fair, this is definitely not Stevie’s original idea—he’s quoting almost VERBATIM from the latest creepy preschool show, Yo Gabba Gabba. (It’s actually a pretty cool little show if you can get past the weirdness—especially DJ Lance and his unexplainable bright orange body-suit and Russian fur hat [also orange]). But the thing I was so excited about was 1) he remembered ALL the names of the drums AND all the words to the “script” and 2) he was performing them with feeling in an interesting way. So maybe it’s not Hamlet, but hey—I was impressed.

If you’ve ever been in my boys’ room, you know that it’s covered in those glow-in-the-dark stick-on stars and planets. (We got them at Frys, and the boys love it—Steven and I figure that as long as we’re in NASA country, we might as well get them excited about space). Well yesterday I saw that my husband had attached this round battery-operated night light to the wall, and had titled it the “sun”-- which made the solar system complete. I went in there awhile ago and the boys had flashlights and were exploring the universe.

Today we played “Name that Sound.” We gathered all our toy musical instruments in a box, and went inside a dark closet. Then we each took turns playing an instrument out of the box, and everyone else had to guess what instrument it was. As loud as this game is, the dark room makes me sleepy.

Just a few minutes ago, Stevie asked me if I wanted to play soccer. I was unfortunately unable to at the moment, so he enlists his little brother to help. Stevie assigned the role of “catcher” to David (which I can only assume means goalie) and they had a rip-roaring game of soccer right in the living room—that is until David snatched the ball and began running away yelling “MY BALL! MY BALL!” General pandemonium followed.

Hopefully, some of these anecdotes will make up for the hours and hours of Nick Jr. my children have inevitably watched (and can apparently quote).